Category: people

“[Madeline Arakawa] Gins practiced an idiosyncratic and highly personal brand of art that sought to deploy architecture in the service of large essential questions about the nature of being.”

“Mr. Hess’s attempts to find his birth mother were unsuccessful — he made three trips back to the convent, where he was told by the nuns that they had no records about Ms. Lee and they had no idea how to find her — he did opt to be buried in Roscrea, in the hopes that Philomena would one day find him.”

Beth Morrison, producer: “The ability to make decisions as I want to make them, without an institution, means that I can take more risks, and it means that we can change course on a dime.”

“Roger Ebert has been gone for nine months and doesn’t appear to have slowed down much. … The looming question is how far the legacy of someone even as popular as Roger Ebert can be extended posthumously.”

Before this phone call, it had never occurred to Toni Kirkpatrick that her contest winner might have spent the past 25 years in prison, where he’s serving a life sentence for murder.

Drabinsky had been stripped of his Order of Canada medal. A federal court judge found “no basis” for allowing Drabinsky a judicial review to look into the governor general’s 2012 decision to rescind the medal.

“One of the most influential African American writers of his generation, [he] courted controversy as a poet, playwright and provocateur and who was a primary intellectual architect of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s.”

Alaa Al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) was a strong opponent of the Mubarak regime and champion of the Arab Spring, and he cheered his homeland’s first democratic elections. A year later, he cheered the military’s overthrow of Presdient Morsi and the elected Muslim Brotherhood government – and most of Egypt’s intelligentsia (and a quite a lot of the public) cheered right along with him. What happened?

Since their release, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have begun using their new-found fame, connections and energy for the cause of prison reform. Masha Gessen describes the horrific conditions they faced in their penal colonies and explains why this new work could have far more resonance within Russia than singing about Putin in a Moscow cathedral did.

Robin Abcarian: “Born in 1901, he was a man of his times … [and] creative genius who had a certain totalitarian streak. Have you ever been to a Disney park? Did you feel ‘free’ there?”